Publication of Ten Lectures on Spoken Language and Gesture from the Perspective of Multimodality by Alan Cienki

Each year, a consortium of seven universities in Beijing, organized by Beihang University, invites one or two cognitive linguists to give a series of ten lectures for a week as part of the China International Forum on Cognitive Linguistics. Alan Cienki was invited in 2013, and now the lectures have been published in written and spoken form, as a book with online audio recordings, by Brill as part of their new series “Distinguished Lectures in Cognitive Linguistics”. More information about the book can be viewed on the website of Brill Publishers.

Ten Lectures on Spoken Language and Gesture from the Perspective of Cognitive Linguistics

Cognitive linguistics is purported to be a usage-based approach, yet only recently has research in some of its subfields turned to spontaneous spoken (versus written) language data. The collection of Alan Cienki’s Ten Lectures on Spoken Language and Gesture from the Perspective of Cognitive Linguistics considers what it means to apply different approaches from within this field to the dynamic, multimodal combination of speech and gesture.

The lectures encompass such main paradigms as blending and mental space theory, conceptual metaphor and metonymy, construction and cognitive grammars, image schemas, and mental simulation in relation to semantics. Overall, Alan Cienki shows that taking the usage-based commitment seriously with audio-visual data raises new issues and questions for theoretical models in cognitive linguistics.

Readership

Undergraduates, post-graduate students and others with some basic knowledge of cognitive linguistics who want to expand it through consideration of spoken language as data, including the role of speakers’ gestures.